


Light The Way

by Blackorchid666



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Child Neglect, Childhood Memories, Falling In Love, Family, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Kid - Freeform, M/M, Past Violence, Romance, Slow Build, Slow Build Castiel/Dean Winchester
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-05
Packaged: 2018-10-27 09:46:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10806639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blackorchid666/pseuds/Blackorchid666
Summary: How far would you go to protect your loved ones?Some of you might say « I’d kill for them », and that’s exactly what I did to ensure my family safety.I pleaded not guilty for the offense I committed because I believed I had done the right thing to guard from harm those the police never seemed to care about.In the end, I’ve been convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to fifteen years behind bars.My biggest lost? Not being able to raise my son.My biggest win? Meeting with Castiel, without whom this book would have never been written and published.My name is Dean Winchester, and this is my story. Once you read it, would you declare me guilty or not guilty of my crime?





	1. Preface

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first time writing on AO3 so I still need to figure how everything works here..  
> Let me apologize if there is any mistake, english is not my first language.  
> Also this is my first Destiel fic :) Hope you enjoy !

 

 

**Preface**

 

If I had been told years ago, or even a few months ago, that I would once write a book, I’d probably have rolled my eyes and sighed, thinking that I was being made fun of.

I, the drop-out of high school who had never stayed in the same place of education for more than 3 months?

I, the dude who didn’t have a high school diploma or even a GED until much recently?

I, that 34 year old man who had been harp on about how a good to nothing he was for almost his whole life?

But here I am, as surprising as it can be, laying on paper, words after words, sentences after sentences that revolve around nothing but my life.

 

I wouldn’t say this book is my autobiography because it sounds a bit presumptuous. Get my point. People tend to read other’s autobiographies when said persons are famous one, but I’m just a simple man. A man who lived through pile of shitty moments. But so have others.

I’m not claiming I’m someone special, though my family would probably argue with that, but I simply don’t feel that way. I know some have it worse than me, but others don’t and that’s why I’ve allowed myself a little rant. Of hundred pages.

 

I’m not an expert with words, but I guess I’ve been improving lately. Hell, I don’t have much to do behind bars except stuffing pieces of knowledge in that head of mine. I suppose it shows that anyone can write, as long as their feelings are true.

 

Being jailed had never been part of my life plan even if it doesn’t surprise me more than that either. Knowing where I come from, I guess being sentenced to years behind bars was a logical ending but still, it doesn’t mean I find it fair.

Damn, everyone knows that life isn’t fair and that it sometimes sucks - more often than it doesn’t - but for all that, it doesn’t sooth the ache.

I have a little boy out there, a lovely sunshine who now has to grow up without his father. He has lived his fair deal of crap already, and I hate myself for putting him through this hell at such a young age.

I had promised myself that the day I would become a father I would give my child the happy childhood me and my brother had never had, but see how greatly I succeeded? It’s a total fail.

There are so many things I’m missing in his life, so many events I wish I could take part in, but I try to tell myself that if I wasn’t in prison at the moment, then my son wouldn’t be out there living. And it makes the pain a little less stinky. But who am I kidding? It still hurts like hell.

But enough of that now, we will have plenty of occasions to talk about my parenting skills later on.

 

What you might except to come across in this book is basically nothing but stories of my childhood, and growing up years mixing with all those life events that lead me to that cold place I am currently staying at.

Be prepared to read about my family too, a family for whom I didn’t hesitate to kill and as my uncle Bobby always says, « family don’t end with blood ».

 

Castiel is a proof of that saying. That man kicked my ass on more occasions than I think it was possible, but I’m glad he did else I don’t know in what state I would be right now.

Because no matter how many people there are out there caring for you, life inside jail is a complete different world and the sentence « I know it’s hard in there but keep strong » has no real depth if the one saying it hasn’t been in jail for more than a visiting hour. Sure compassion and empathy is great, and I know how much my family tries to keep my head above water and give me strength to keep going, but words aren’t always enough.

And Cas, he is the one who physically kept my head above water. And showed in my face a notepad and thrust a pen in my hand saying that if I wanted to bitch about the unfairness of my jail sentence, I should do it silently and write a whole book to let people decide whether I was guilty or not guilty of my crime.

 

 

 

So here we go everyone, Welcome to Dean Winchester’s life.

 

 


	2. I

 

**I**

 

 _  
_"Being a parent means loving your children more than you’ve ever loved yourself." I guess my dad didn’t love himself a lot then.

 

My dad would have never won the father of the year award nor be given those #1 DAD mugs either. He wasn’t a great father, not in the least. 

There are some parents who are awesome role models for their kids, others who are simply great parents who love their child and make them happy, and then others, who aren’t extraordinary but who do their best for their families anyway. 

Then there are the parents who don’t care about their children, like, you have no clue as to why they’ve made babies. There are also parents who give their kids shit because they are worthless adults, and there’s got the shitty parents who clearly are nuts and fucking psychopaths. That’s a pretty summarized summary because I believe there are as many different parents and families as there are individuals on this planet and it would be way too long to go through all of that now.

 

So let’s say my dad was a mix of all the bad examples I gave above. My mom? Not so much. She was better than my father for sure but she was still something. A big something. 

But my dad? He was a fucking  _huge_  something. The kind of person you don’t want to bother. Yet, as a kid it’s your duty to annoy your parents and I did a pretty good job at that. Not always on purpose, let’s be honest, but damn, if there had been a way I could have switched father, I would have done it in a blink of an eye. It would have spared me lots of troubles.

 

Dad had this very strange way of loving me, understand by that, for example, thrusting a gun in my hand, when I was six.

And I’m not talking about plastic guns kids enjoy playing with. No, my dad saw things in big aka  _a colt with ivory grip_. In my tiny hands, logical you’d say right?

I was kind of proud of that thing back then, even went to school and showed it off to my classmates. They were all so jelly that my gun could shoot real bullets unlike theirs. Hell, some of them didn’t even have the right to own a plastic gun because their parents thought it was too dangerous and that it was depicting violence they didn’t want their child to be exposed to. 

I didn’t care much about the grown-ups point of view in all honesty because I was the cool kid with the cool gun and that’s everything that mattered.

Well, until the gun went off on its own and shot through a boy’s foot. 

Yup, the gun was loaded, thanks dad!

 

I got shit scared that day and ran off before a teacher could get me. I was certain my dad would give me a good beating once I’d get home, and he sort of did, but instead of making sure my classmate was alright or anything someone with common sense would have done, my dad simply pulled our suitcases out, threw some stuff in them and loaded everything in his car trunk. He took me and my baby bro with him, went to pick mom at the dinner she was working at, and we left town. Just like that.

I still have no clue how we had been able to get away back then, but maybe the fact that we were new in town and hadn’t especially socialized with anyone yet had made it easy like piece of cake.

You would have thought that after such an incident my dad would have kept the gun away from me at all cost, but nope, he decided to act very cleverly and taught me how to shoot. _Yoohoo_. Awesome.

I was six years old and spent hours in the woods shooting at beer cans. So much of childhood memories to share with my own little boy right?

 

 

My son…. This precious gift of life. 

I was scared for a long time at the idea of becoming a father. I didn’t want to have kids because it was so frightening. How was I supposed to be a good dad if I had never had a good father myself? Sure I sort of had raised Sam, but raising your own blood is completely different than looking after your little brother. 

The closest person I know who fits the fatherly figure is Bobby. He doesn’t look like that at all, but the man wears his heart on his sleeve and he was - still is - more of a father to me than my own dad ever was. Bobby’s the kind of man who doesn’t beat around the bush and gives you a piece of your mind even when it’s none of his business, because once he considers you as family, then everything that concerns you become his fucking business too. This is so annoying by times and I’ve lost counts at how many arguments we’ve already had, but he means so much to me that I’m just so glad he sticks with my painful ass.

That old man can read through me like an open book and it is so frustrating because there are times I just don’t want to talk about a specific topic - usually the topic that shouldn't be ignored - but Bobby doesn’t care about that and he’s going to help and worm it out of you whether you want it or not.

Sometimes I don’t even realize until it’s already done that I’ve shared with him what I was trying so hard to keep secret from him. The man knows how to get his ways and I wouldn’t be surprised if he is into some kind of obscure magic or voodoo stuff like that. 

Yeah, the old man is a bit creepy at times, see ?

 

 

Anyway, all this ramble to say that Bobby was the one I inspired myself from to accept my son in my life. 

Yup,  _accept_  him. Get myself used to the idea that I had a mini me and that I couldn’t drop him off in the middle of a forest like someone would do with a dog they didn’t want anymore. 

 

My dad did that once. Not with a dog but with my brother, because apparently, it was a great way to teach Sam that when dad said _no_ to buying a pack of gummy bears at a gas station in the middle of some deserted road, then it meant _no_. No bitching about it. End of discussion.  _No_ means _no_.

My dad never drove back to the woods to look for Sammy and told me that if I wanted so badly him to be back, then I had to stop whining about it and go get him on my own. 

And I did. 

I stole a bike at the Motel we were staying at and drove in the middle of the night on some creepy road to find Sammy. I don’t remember being scared of being alone on a deserted straight line but I was frightened for my brother. I was afraid something might have happened to him and was dreading to find in which state he was.

I pedaled for hours and the sun was starting to rise when I’ve had finally found Sam. He was sat with his back against a three, shivering like a leaf because it was freaking mid November and that he was wearing nothing but a hoodie and a pair of pyjamas bottoms. 

How much I hated my father that day. Sammy was only 4 for god’s sake!

 

I wasn’t much older than him thus it wasn’t supposed to be my responsibility to take care of him, but starting that cold night, I took the decision to take Sammy under my wings and protect him from my dad no matter what. 

I wasn’t sure at that time whether my dad would do something like that again or not, but it was important to me to be clear about it in my head. I promised Sam that night that I would always watch his back and be there for him, and this is by far one of the best and biggest decisions I’ve taken in my life.

Sam was my family and as the big brother, it was my duty to make sure he was safe. 

For your information, dad wouldn’t have gone back to pick Sam up from the woods. I asked him many years ago during one of our heated argument if he had had the intention to drive back to that road to bring him to the motel room and he replied the exact following words: "The point of abandoning _something_ is to let it go _forever_."

Yep, awesome dad. 

 

Whatever, back to my previous point aka my son. 

I learned that I was a father on a Thursday morning after a phone call from Bobby urging me to bring my ass to his shop asap. Once there, the old man told me someone had let something for me inside one of his wreck cars and came back carrying a Moses basket with a baby inside. Bobby said he had found out the little dude because he wouldn’t stop crying and it had woken him up in the middle of the night. 

I thought it was a joke at first, especially when there was only a freckin’ _sticky-note_ on the baby blanket stating "He’s yours dean. I went through the pregnancy and labor so my part of the job in done. It’s your turn now."

 

Turns out the joke wasn’t one and that the little dude was mine for real. 

Bobby’s the one who dragged my butt to get a paternity test on the very same day because " if the buddy isn’t yours then we have to drop him at the police station and let them deal with the crying monster."

Said monster is actually an angel but back to those days, I tried everything I could to pass the buck onto somebody else. If someone had managed to drop the baby out of nowhere then what prevented me to do the same?

The _what_ turned out to be a _who_ as Bobby pushed the little dude into my arms a week later and spat in my face that unless I wanted to be a dick like my father, I had to take my responsibilities and make things right for the kid. 

And so I did, but not without freaking out every single day.

 

I named my son Jaidon the moment I accepted him in my life because calling him "the little thing" or "the monster" didn’t seem really right around people. But let’s be honest, I still call him my little thing because it’s cute and my son is a cutie pie. 

Oh _pie_ , that’s going to be another topic in this book. I love it so much but unfortunately prison doesn’t think it’s something worth being served at lunch or dinner, which is a total bummer if you were to ask me.

My brother tried to bring me one once but some correctional officer in charge of searching him threw it away. I was so mad and started  to silently hate all the officers I came across thinking that sometimes it wouldn’t kill them to act a little nicer.

 

Well, not true. Acting nice with inmates would definitely have some COs get killed. I’ve witnessed some shit going on between them and inmates and those men sure must be a little nuts to be willing to do this job, so I kind of understand why some are a bit on the mean side. Inmates aren’t always angels but don’t get me wrong, I’m not tolerating correctional officers’ treating us as being beneath them. And unfortunately, this happens quite often.

Yet, some COs are fine and know how to communicate with inmates, like Meg. She’s working in my Unit and while I was a little taken aback to see a woman working here - I mean, she’s a midget compared to us - you wouldn’t want to have beef with her unless you like getting your ass whipped. She really fits in there and I may confess enjoying my time here more when she’s on her shift. 

 

The other correctional officer I should probably introduce you is Castiel. Or _Mister Novak_. 

If you’ve paid attention to what I’ve written so far, then that name should ring a bell as I’ve dropped it in the preface already. I could write a series of books about him only - I’ll keep that in mind knowing I still have a few _years_ to spend locked here - but I’ll content myself by sharing a few stories in which he played a role in. 

I’ve got a good one about him giving me a homemade slice of apple pie, but I’ll keep that for another chapter. I’ll just say that the man got in real trouble for it, but that was definitely the best pie I have ever eaten so I don’t feel really bad about the outcome of this story. 

 

The day I met Castiel, I’d been in prison for a few weeks already. The inmates had given him such a welcome, understand by that, yells, cheering and roaring, that I thought the man was a new staff member and that they were trying to intimidate him. But I was wrong.

It was not even 5:30 on a Thursday morning and we were all out of our cells getting ready for the head call when the correctional officers’ shifts changed. Crowley who was standing next to me appeared more than pleased to see Cas but I got to understand why only weeks later. You’ll learn about it in a few chapters, can’t spoil you right away, can I?

Whatever, Crowley had asked him how his feathered _ass_ was doing and my mind had raced to decode those words, wondering if something shitty-below-the-waist had happened to the CO, but  turned out he _only_ had tried to stop a fight that had broken between a bunch of inmates and everyone involved had ended in a pretty bad shape, Cas included. This explained why he hadn’t been there when I had arrived, the dude was too busy getting his ribs and concussion healed. 

When you look at Castiel though, you wouldn’t think the man could hurt a bee, but just like Meg he knows how to whip asses good. I saw it plenty of times by now but it doesn’t mean I stay out of troubles when the dude’s here.

 

I still perfectly remember the first interaction I had with Cas. He was calling everyone’s name to make sure we were all there and not oversleeping when he stumbled over my name and stopped to look around to see who had answered _here_ , in other words: me.

You’re probably wondering how I can recall that stuff so precisely when it happened years ago, but if the bluest blue eyes had stared intensively at you the way Castiel’s had, then you’d understand why it’s impossible to forget.

He didn’t say a word but complained that nobody had told him there was a new inmate in his Unit , that it was unprofessional and went on his duty, sending us to make our beds and tidy our cells.

You have no idea how much I hate waking up at the crack of down and do cores before getting breakfast. Not that breakfast is good here, but how are we expected to do things when we have no food in our stomach? 

Even today I’m still not used to this routine, probably never will but what choices do I get? _None_. 

 

Castiel watched me closely since day one and while I now know that it was only because he was trying to figure me out as I was the new guy, I used to find his behavior a bit on the creepy side. I mean, every time I was doing something, like picking my fork to eat or unwrapping a snack or even just walking down the stairs to sit at the common area tables, blue eyes were on me. _All the time._

As a result, I didn’t shower for three days because Castiel was the one supervising it and I couldn’t make my mind to possibly have him watching me doing my business there. 

I had sort of grown used to the lack of intimacy and personal space the prison’ showers were giving us but even if CO presence during that time slot was usually reassuring, there was something about Castiel’s way of staying there that I couldn’t shake off. I’m not saying the man would have watched me inappropriately, but he made me slightly uncomfortable no matter how the other guys seemed to be fine with him. 

 

It didn’t bother me more than that to skip shower time - it’s not mandatory to take one every day, but you have to stay a minimum clean so the body wash thingy is twice a week - because the motels I grew up in weren’t especially very hygienic and a glance at the bathroom was sometimes enough to convince you not to set a foot in it. 

When mom was still around, the rooms we stayed at were relatively clean, but once she was gone and that it was just dad, Sammy and I, it seemed that mould covered showers were acceptable. Sam got sick more than I can remember due to the lack of sanitary environment but dad wouldn’t have any of it. He kept saying that there weren’t weak men in our family and that the kid had to strengthen his immune system - meaning Sam would hardly ever get meds. 

Dad’s meds consisted of Jack bottles and cheap liquors drink which of course didn’t suit a sick young boy’s needs, not that my dad would have felt guilty to make Sammy drink anyway. If this could make him stop whining, coughing or sneezing, then dad considered it to be a pretty efficient medicine.When it was like that, I’d sneak in the motel’s kitchen to steal tea bags because mom always made us tea when we were sick. 

One day I got caught stealing and got brought back to our room by one of the motel staff. The only thing dad told me was that if I wanted to steal, I should at least bring him something strong to drink, not some herbal shit. 

 

But back to my previous point, about the jail’s showers. 

Castiel had come to me on the fourth day and had asked me very bluntly if I didn’t know how they worked or if I was trying to hold some kind of dirty contest. Of course I couldn’t tell him I was a bit chicken to get my naked butt anywhere close to him, so I shut up and got made fun of by Crowley. That fucker thought it was funny to inform Castiel that I needed a little help to use the soap to foam my body. 

Cas didn’t put up with his joke though and simply reminded me of the rules, in other words, that if I didn’t want a CO to force me into a shower and do the job for me, then I had to make a move to the bathroom and get my business done there quickly. Which I did before the situation could become even more embarrassing. 

 

So much of that. Cas was a bit of an ass and bossed me around a bit too much, but pulled the correctional officer card every fuckin’ time I complained :

"It’s my job to enforce rules and keep order within this prison Dean."

"It’s my job to prevent disturbances Dean." 

"It’s my job to search you Dean."

"It’s my job to supervise your activities Dean."

"It’s my job to be a pain in the ass because I have to make sure you’re not a danger to you or the others Dean."

 

You get my point, Cas justified all his actions with the "It’s my job" thing and I believed him for months. 

Until I didn’t anymore but that’s another story.

 

 


End file.
